Cabin Update: Siding, a Porch and a Surprise

By Erin Huffstetler | 08/31/2015 | 10 Comments

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My mother-in-law requested the girls for an overnight the last two Saturdays, so my husband and I snuck off to the cabin to work, and we got so much done.

I nailed up a bunch more cedar shakes. Look how close I am to the end now! I shouldn’t have any problem tying this project up in September.

And my husband got two out of the three back windows trimmed out. It’s crazy how much more finished things look with a bit of trim.

But the really exciting improvement is the work that we got done on the bath house.

Remember that pile of decking that we rescued from a curb pile a couple weeks ago? Well, we hauled it up to our property, and we used it to rebuild the porch on the bath house.

The original porch was built out of rough-sawn oak (probably milled on site), and it was in really bad shape. (That 300 lb pig that walked across it last winter sure didn’t help).

So, we tore it off, leveled out the ground …

and built a new porch.

The contractors had cut the deck into smaller pieces to make it light enough to haul to the curb, so we had short board lengths to work with. No biggie. We just framed our porch to accommodate the short decking material.

We just need to add a couple lag bolts along the center seam, and we’ll be done. Big improvement don’t you think?

I checked prices at Lowes, and the same lumber would have cost us $154.44, plus tax, if we’d bought it new! And since we used decking screws that we had left over from another project, this was a true no-cost redo. Now, I’m hoping we’ll find more decking in curb piles because we still need to build an outdoor solar shower and a porch for the cabin.

Speaking of finding things … we decided to take a hike after lunch one of the days we were up there. We crossed a seasonal creek that we had never crossed before, and you know what we found? A whole other trail that we didn’t know we had!

We followed the trail for a bit, and suddenly found ourselves at the most amazing pond. This picture doesn’t even begin to capture how magical it is. Big rocks jutting out along the edge; deep, clear water; lots of fish. Such a peaceful spot just tucked away in the woods.

We looked at aerial photos when we got home, and it sits just inside the border of a neighboring property, So, it isn’t ours (which we pretty much knew), but it was still a nice surprise on our walk. We plan to clean up our new trail, and to build a couple bridges for the spots where the trail crosses the creek. The girls haven’t seen the new trail yet; I’m anxious to show it to them.

On our next trip up, I’m going to bring all the wild flower seeds in my seed collection, and let them wild cast them along the driveway. I was going to do it myself this past weekend, but I figured it would be a fun project for them.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.